With multiple devices via which the customers can now consume content, there has been an exponential increase in demand for a wider selection and formats of content that the customers want to be available for delivery. One of the implications of this ever growing demand for more content on the content serving network nodes is to store greater amount of content ready to be delivered to customers. In the current deployment many content delivery networks (CDNs) rely on edge nodes or the network nodes closest to a requesting customer to serve content to the requesting customer. Such an approach can become problematic as the number of services or content that can be served grows and the formats, bitrates and popularity of the content becomes more widely distributed among the viewers. The issue is complicated by the fact that while there is limited storage in the edge nodes to cache the content, still many edge nodes are burdened with storing both unpopular content requested by very few subscribers as well as popular content requested by many. While at first it may seem desirable to serve both popular and unpopular content cached in the edge nodes for quick delivery, storing and managing content with wide popularity differences can significantly lower the efficiency of the edge nodes.
In view of the above discussion, it would be desirable if popular and unpopular content could be dynamically identified and network nodes could be dynamically assigned to cache content based on the popularity of requested content. It should be appreciated that there is a need for methods and apparatus that facilitate dynamically determining content popularities and caching locally popular content to customers on edge nodes while not using local resources to cache less popular content.